Sally Spencer's Blog

On how I grappled for a gun - but could never use it in a book ... Let me tell you a story, and before we get started, let’s break all the rules and list the main characters. The first is a retired American naval officer called Tom. He is based in Madrid, and is an official military historian, in pursuit of which he visits every American military base in Western Europe (this was before the Berlin Wall came down) and collects reports from the sergeants collating the information. He is also – and

  As Alfred Hitchcock once said, people tend to be most frightened not when something happens, but when they are waiting for it to happen.   So it was in the early autumn of 1979.   Everyone in Iran knew that, sooner or later, the Shah would fall, but apart from a few demonstrations, nothing was actually happening. And people did get scared!   The sound of a car back-firing was enough to set the heart racing. The sight of a few soldiers on the street served as a reminder that man is mortal and

  When he was sixteen, Alan applied for a scholarship at Atlantic College, the international sixth form boarding school in Wales, which, at the time, was more expensive than Eton. The school had both an outward bound and academic ethos, and given that his grades were far from outstanding and he was no athlete, he never thought he would be accepted.   Fortunately he was, because it was while he was at Atlantic College that he met his partner, Lanna, to whom he has been happily married for

  It is hard for most people to comprehend what a grip Francisco Franco had on Spain, but perhaps one story will illustrate it.   Franco would not allow X films to be shown in the country, but when he fell into a coma, the cinemas ordered them from abroad. Yet they still did not dare to show them – even though everyone knew he would never recover – until the day his death was announced. And on that same day, it is widely claimed, it was impossible to find a bottle of champagne in the whole of

Alan (aka Sally Spencer, in case you didn't know) was born, a few years after the end of the Second World War, in Marston, a salt panning village in Cheshire. It's between Northwich and Great Budworth on the map above, and is the basis of Salton in "The Salton Killings", Buckworth in "A Picnic in Eden", and Marston itself, which is where Becky grew up in "Salt of the Earth" and "Up Our Street".   The salt works dominated the village.The main building contained two large pans, which were over

  Actually, the Shahbanou - Empress of Iran - comes calling.   The school where we worked was on a new development at the edge of the desert, and could only be reached by a rough track. Then, one day, it was announced that the Empress would be visiting, and a road appeared overnight. It wasn’t a very good road, and it began to crumble almost immediately, but it didn’t have to be a good road – all it had to do was look good from the Empress’s helicopter.   Two days before the visit, all the local

  My readers devote several hours of their valuable time to reading something I have written – so how could I not love them?   But there are just a few (a very few) who really get up my nose – and they are the ones who cannot distinguish between what one of my characters says and what I, as a person, think.   Fatal Quest, the last of the Woodend books, provides a perfect example of this. Woodend is called to a crime scene, and when he discovers that the victim is half West Indian, one of the

  Somerset Maughan once said "there are only three rules to writing, but unfortunately nobody knows what they are". And he was dead right about that. It’s a funny business to be in, and often, I find, a business that you’re not really in control of. If you’re a lorry driver, your job is to deliver a load from point x to point y, and barring accidents, it’s a pretty straightforward run.   For a lot of writers (and I’m one of them) you know where you’re starting out from, but you don’t always know